Serializable snapshot isolation in PostgreSQL

DRK Ports, K Grittner - arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.4179, 2012 - arxiv.org
DRK Ports, K Grittner
arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.4179, 2012arxiv.org
This paper describes our experience implementing PostgreSQL's new serializable isolation
level. It is based on the recently-developed Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI) technique.
This is the first implementation of SSI in a production database release as well as the first in
a database that did not previously have a lock-based serializable isolation level. We reflect
on our experience and describe how we overcame some of the resulting challenges,
including the implementation of a new lock manager, a technique for ensuring memory …
This paper describes our experience implementing PostgreSQL's new serializable isolation level. It is based on the recently-developed Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI) technique. This is the first implementation of SSI in a production database release as well as the first in a database that did not previously have a lock-based serializable isolation level. We reflect on our experience and describe how we overcame some of the resulting challenges, including the implementation of a new lock manager, a technique for ensuring memory usage is bounded, and integration with other PostgreSQL features. We also introduce an extension to SSI that improves performance for read-only transactions. We evaluate PostgreSQL's serializable isolation level using several benchmarks and show that it achieves performance only slightly below that of snapshot isolation, and significantly outperforms the traditional two-phase locking approach on read-intensive workloads.
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